Adding A Waterfall To Your Landscaping

What You Need To Know Before Adding A Waterfall To Your Landscaping
By: Scott Fromherz

Water features are a great way to enhance your landscape, but they can be quite intimidating to someone who has never had experience building or maintaining them. The good news is that, by understanding a few principles and following some basic steps, anyone can create a beautiful waterfall in their outdoor landscaping.

The advantage of adding a waterfall to your landscaping as opposed to a simple pond is that a waterfall will add sound and motion to your waterscape. These characteristics will most certainly add to the relaxation factor of your waterfall landscape. Once you have made the decision to move forward with the addition of a waterfall to your landscape design, there are some simple elements to consider.

Finding The Best Location In Your Landscape For A Waterfall

Location, location, location! It will not only add to your home value, it will determine whether your waterfall landscape will be high or low maintenance. For example, the idea of a beautiful running waterfall under a tree or two might sound good - until fall arrives and you find yourself cleaning many fallen leaves out of your water.

Since you will be installing a pump to continue to circulate water through your waterfall, availability of electricity will most certainly be a factor. Since too much direct sunlight can trigger algae growth in your water, finding a shadier spot for your waterfall landscape will save you on water maintenance. With these issues in mind, it is also helpful to remember that your waterfall will create a focal point in your landscaping, so plan for a central location that you will be able to enjoy.

Landscaping Your Waterfall To Scale

Many starting out in the quest for a water feature will originally design a waterfall landscape that will be higher than necessary for the desired effect. A waterfall drop of about two feet will bring you the desired effect, and create the proper scale for your average sized pond.

For additional trickling action, build your waterfall a slight distance from you pond to achieve a beautiful stream effect. Waterfall materials do not have to be complicated or pricey. You can stack rocks above your pond for a natural waterfall landscape, and a fiberglass liner makes a simple and low maintenance pond come to life.

Adding a waterfall to your landscaping plan is an attractive way to bring the element of water into your yard. The sound and motion of your waterfall will offer a relaxing retreat for you and your family to enjoy.



source - www.keywordarticles.org

Landscaping Plans

Landscaping Plans: Blueprints For Perfection
By: Scott Fromherz

Like any great undertaking, you need to have some idea of what you are doing at any given time. Landscaping plans are no exception. The tricky part is getting around to all the various landscaping plans and options that there could potentially be, and of course, visualizing the whole event in your minds eye can be challenging.

Building Your Blueprints

The first and most obvious way to plan for what you need to do is to draw a sketch. Sit down with a pencil, and yes, it must be a pencil and a blank piece of paper. Block your house and any other obstacles that you might not be able to work around, and then - go to town! Draw something, erase it, try again - your landscaping plans are just that - plans and as with any plans you need to do some brainstorming before you can get anywhere with it.

Your landscaping plans should probably go through several drafts before you come up with a pretty solid idea of what you want. That is not to say that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you know exactly what you want your to look like, although you might. The premise of the exercise is just to help you visualize, brainstorm, and work through some of the potential options for your landscaping plans.

But, what about for those of us who are artistically challenged; who's stick figures most closely resemble H.P. Lovecraft's nightmares? Worry not - google.com offers a free utility called SketchUp, which can create 3D models for Google Earth, another utility. SketchUp lets you put into a 3D visualization exactly how your landscaping plans will look. This has definite benefits over the pencil and paper method, but at the same it can limit creativity and can be frustrating for those people who are not technology-compatible (get the joke?). However, it is another option for creating those wonderful landscaping plans which will be your first and arguably most important step to having your landscaping dreams come true.

Outside of that, landscaping plans involving drawing, calling contractors, finding the best price for exactly what you want, deciding on plants, layout, colors, form, textures - the whole nine yards. That's why making your landscaping plans is so important because the project can quickly become overwhelming and not all that enjoyable, which one would hope it would be if you are trying to do it yourself.




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How to get rid of Ant problems

Ants-How to get rid of Ant problems
By: Sandra Burgess

Living in a very dry area of Australia, I am actually very happy
to see all the ants coming inside the house as this means we are in for lots of rain. Trouble is, leave any trace of food around and it is covered in ants in seconds. The dog/cat dishes have to be emptied and cleaned straight after feeding and make sure the kids don’t leave the honey or cordial out!
The problem lies when the ant problem becomes an
infestation and they start taking over the house. Then we have to do something to fix the problem.

There is no point in just killing the ants you can see, this is actually only about 1% of the entire colony and when they do not come home to the nest more ants are automatically sent out.
The ideal situation is to find the main nest where the queens and all the other ants are and eradicate the entire colony with liquid bait.

You can try following the ant trail back to the main colony but this is near impossible as the trail may go behind skirting boards, along the inside of the walls and out somewhere at the other end of the house

The most effective treatment for homeowners is to bait the ants that are inside the home. The advantage of using Baits is the ants will take the poison back to the nest, the queen and the rest of the colony will feed on the bait and the entire colony will be destroyed.

Place the bait at different points along the trail the ants have been using. You should see heaps of ants scurrying to the bait. Do not kill them, just let them feed and you will see them leaving to go back to the nest, this is good!
The ant activity should subside within a few days. Keep topping up the bait until no more ants are seen.

Okay, you have put down bait but the ants are ignoring it! Would you believe that ants are fussy eaters and can alter their eating habits at different times of the year. It does not mean the bait is no good, just that the ants are looking for another type of food source, so try another bait such as liquid bait.

The above baiting treatment will solve your indoor problem but if you have heaps of ants outside they will eventually come back indoor looking for food or water.
Therefore you should be treating both the home and yard for ants.

Foundation - For effective ant control, you should spray the outside foundation of the home with an Insecticide repellant. A guide for spraying would be two foot up by 1 foot out, all the way around the foundation. Also treat the Windowsills, Door trims, Pipes, Cables and Pathways.
This should be done regularly, probably every quarter.

Yard - Treating the yard. The best solution for treating the yard is to use both Granules and liquid bait. Granules will last approximately 2-3 months. Liquid baits evaporate and need to be topped up regularly, especially if you live in a hot dry climate. Check frequently to make sure they have not dried up..

To recap, Gel Bait for Indoors, Sprays for the Foundation, Granules and Liquid Bait for outdoors. This will solve all your ant problems if repeated regularly.

Read more about the ‘How to get rid of Ants’ at www.nichecontentcentral.com/ How_to_get_rid_of_Ants.html

source - www.keywordarticles.org